Integrating eBay Inventory on Classified Sites for Consumers Globally

By realizing inherent synergies across our platforms, we have a great opportunity to unlock the power of eBay for our customers.

eBay is one of the largest and most successful commerce businesses ever created. Over the course of 21 years, we’ve developed a global online presence that includes eBay marketplaces, StubHub, and classifieds platforms in numerous countries around the world. Our brand promise is simple: we help every person find their version of perfect, no matter what it is. We deliver on that promise by offering an incredible breadth of choice (more than one billion items of inventory from new, to unique, and everything in between) through simple and efficient shopping platforms, and by harnessing our technology and data to deliver a powerful personalized experience for consumers.

Increasingly, we are unearthing synergies across our business assets on behalf of our customers. In many countries, eBay owns both a leading marketplace platform and a leading classifieds site. We’ve identified opportunities to share the broad selection of eBay marketplace inventory with our classifieds sites. This approach provides a win-win for our customers: Our classifieds buyers have access to more selection, and our marketplace sellers have access to more buyers (thereby increasing their sales velocity).

In 2016 we ran successful tests exposing eBay inventory on Gumtree, our local classifieds site in Australia. The idea behind this effort was to deliver even more relevant search results to consumers, leading to increased conversion on eBay-listings. The responses and engagement from Classifieds buyers with this new experience have been positive and highlight the opportunity we have to unlock significant consumer benefits by bringing our platforms more closely together through inventory sharing. Based on the results of these efforts, we are announcing similar programs to share eBay inventory on our Gumtree UK classifieds site and German classifieds site, Kleinanzeigen, both by the end of 2016.

Examples of the customer experience in Australia:

Examples of the customer experience in Germany:

We are also integrating and cooperating at our technology infrastructure level. We are sharing data analytics, consumer insights, and knowledge around technology such as predictive intelligence, which will enable us to deliver improved search, browse, and selling experiences. One particularly compelling example is how we are sharing models and systems that provide motors category sellers with technological tools that simplify and automate the vehicle selling process. These tools were developed on the foundation of eBay’s acquisition of Cargigi, and are being used by Kijiji in Canada and Gumtree in South Africa.

What's Coming

In the first half of 2017 we will scale our structured data and predictive model programs, exposing millions of relevant eBay listings on our classifieds sites around the world. Classifieds buyers will benefit from a seamless experience, finding eBay items in their search results and having the ability to purchase them on eBay with or without an eBay account.

By realizing inherent synergies across our platforms, we have a great opportunity to unlock the power of eBay for our customers, especially when it comes to choice and selection.